ch 10

Chapter 10: Body Burdens of Industrial Chemicals in the General Population - Body burden is defined as the quantity of an exogenous substance or its metabolites that has accumulated in an individual or population - Focus on the class of organochlorines because there is ample data on their presence in human tissues and considerable concern about their global accumulation, toxicity, and impact on human and wildlife health Body-Burden Estimation - 3L3L;L:,O8-4-:70341,54OO:9,39L8089L2,90- measuring the concentration of that substance in one or more tissues, usually by gas chromatographymass spectrometry (GCMS) - Chemical body burdens are complex and dynamic in a number of ways, and these characteristics make a full characterization of th0J0307,O5:-OL.8-4-:703 exceedingly difficult: o First, the body burden of a pollutant is not stable over time. It reflects a dynamic balance between the amount taken in and the amount excreted or metabolized into another material o Chemicals that are persistent are those that resist metabolic alteration and excretion andor are tightly bound to the tissues in which they are stored o Second, body burdens are not distributed homogeneously within an individual: the partitioning of a pollutant among various tissues and fluids reflects the 8:-89,3.080J7,,-LOL9,3,11L3L91471,982L307,O8